5 Non-Resolutions for the New Year

I’m not a fan of making resolutions on New Year’s Day. I honestly believe we have too much to do and adding unrealistic expectations to our lives about what will realistically be able to achieve as we manage our children’s lives; guide them to be good little souls affecting and affected by the world; working; cooking; cleaning; trying to find time for ourselves; caring for our parents or other elderly loved ones; and, interacting in some way that allows our husbands (if we have one) to believe that we do still recognize his existence in our world, is too much.

Why add more? Which in turn will only decrease our confidence. The point of doing anything in our lives is to empower ourselves to feel better.

So, I’ve devised a list of non-resolution Resolutions. Little things we can do throughout our day.

The goal is to pick just one every day. That’s right – you’re only allowed to pick one item per day. After a month, if you feel like you can add more than one non-resolution to your daily calendar, have at it.

But the goal is one non-resolution a day for 30-days.  We’re calling it baby steps to babying ourselves.

I do believe if you can find one little something to do for yourself, once a day, you will begin to notice a small change over the course of a couple of months. Log-in to our site and let us know how it’s going or share your own ideas with the BohoMamma community.

Have a Cup of Tea Fit for a Lady: If you’re like a lot of moms, you are running on stale coffee or have increased Starbuck’s 4th Quarter earnings single-handedly. I get it and I am not asking you to give up your beloved and aromatic bean.

I am asking you to switch one cup of joe for one cup of green, white or jasmine tea a day. Just one cup.

And please don’t ignore the beauty of the cup or the teaspoon of honey that sweetens the drink a bit.

Because while the idea is health (antioxidants and relaxation), it’s also about honoring your time to sit and be for a few minutes — of treating yourself to something beautiful, no matter how large or how small.

If you’re going to have that cup of tea, make it the best cup of tea you’ll have all day. It does have caffeine, but it also has antioxidants, and antioxidants are important in allowing the body to fight infection.

Green, White and Jasmine

Eat with Linen in Your Lap: Pick one night out of the week when your entire family eats on real plates, with real linens, surrounded by small, but beautiful bouquet of flowers and a few lit candles (that are quickly blown out so as not to cause a disaster). Serve pizza if you like, because the effort and the work is in the table setting. In our home, we eat with linen or cotton napkins every night. But that’s where I choose to put my energy and my effort. A fully set table doesn’t have to be your choice every night. But there is something magical that happens when children sit at a table and see beauty around them. And that’s what we want for them, right?

We want our children to expect beauty for themselves. We want our children to believe that they are worthy of a linen napkin in their lap. If you really want to go all out, write on the back of a table setting card one thing you noticed the children did well that day.

Photography via Pinterest

Record Memories of Your Children’s Lives Any Way that Inspires You: I am haunted that I will forget certain things that our little ones say or do. So, I have learned to enter their name and the comment in my telephone, on my computer and in the notebook I carry around. This will not do.

Now, I spend a bit of time searching for each of their names in my computer and am beginning to organize their quotes, their sizes, their special drawings into a notebook for each of them. Part of this anxiety is from my own childhood.

My siblings and I don’t have many pictures or stories of us growing up.

Another part of the anxiety is that when I speak to elderly relatives about their children’s lives they tend to forget. I’ll hear, “You know, I don’t really remember,” or “I think…” That won’t do for me.

I am committed to recording memories of our children’s lives. BohoMamma has a Memory Making board of ideas on Pinterest you can reference. For me, I’ve purchased two beautiful leather books and I write and paste and copy and color things, as I have the time. I want them to know who they were when they were little and to decide for themselves if they are the same pip they’ve always been, or if they changed a bit along the way.

Baby’s First Christmas Ornament

Go Vegetarian for a Meal: Make one meal out of the three a vegetarian meal. Just one.

I am taken with 101cookbooks. I love looking at the beautiful photography, but more than the beauty of the site and the use of natural foods and recipes, Heidi Swanson makes food look good and it is healthy.

So, while we are not all accustomed to eating vegetarian at every meal, choose one meal to experiment.

Farro and Roasted Butternut Squash Salad at 101Cookbooks

Call a Friend and Complain: It doesn’t matter if you don’t have anything to complain about. Make something up. Just have a gripe session about the vendor at the local dry cleaner who didn’t smile when you smiled at her or the young college student who didn’t notice you were wearing your skinny jeans.

It doesn’t matter what the complaint, just pick up a phone and call a friend and say, “Hey, can I have a bitch session for a moment?”

The truth is, we are getting more and more lost into our own worlds. And when this happens, our worlds get smaller. We’ve got to push back against those slights, those bad moments and those hurts and the fastest and quickest way out is with a friend.

Photography Credit via Pinterest

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